Celebrating glory of sea and sky

Some of the primitive-looking earlier paintings with high horizons and less credible atmospheres, such as “The Wreck of the ‘Amsterdam’ ’’ by an unknown artist, are as much fun as the later masterpieces. “The Wreck’’ has it all: two ships smashing into rocks, another, the “Amsterdam,’’ pitched at an impossible angle in a heaving sea, and a third on fire beneath a filthily dark sky.

Then again, the more placid views, such as van de Cappelle’s “A Calm Sea with a Jetty and Ships,’’ can be equally engrossing. Marvel, in van de Cappelle’s masterpiece, at the reflectiveness of the water and the high, imperious centrality of the white sun burning through clouds. Both these features would come to play a huge role in the marine paintings and watercolors of Turner, more than a century later.

Indeed, it’s almost impossible to overstate the importance of the Dutch seascape tradition not only on painters like Turner, but on early moderns like Edouard Manet. It’s not often realized that fully one third of Manet’s output addressed maritime subjects, and that these wonderful works owed a great deal to painters like Backhuysen. Manet’s maritime masterpiece, “The Battle of the U.S.S. ‘Kearsarge’ and the C.S.S. ‘Alabama,’ ’’ depicted a dramatic naval scuffle, which was visible from the French coast, during the US Civil War.

Manet is usually regarded as a “realist,’’ and his unusual treatment of this subject was undoubtedly journalistic. But what you notice about it is that the picture’s horizon line is once again very high; it’s almost at Empire line levels.

Was this because, as one mean-spirited critic at the time suggested, the bird’s-eye view allowed Manet to avoid technical difficulties and have the combatants “fight in the shelter of the picture frame’’?

Actually, no. By lifting his horizon line, Manet was not striving for God-like detachment. He was aiming for greater immediacy. He wanted to render the scene as French observers would have seen it at the time, staring in amazement (one of these two ships had chased the other right across the Atlantic!) from atop the high cliffs of Cherbourg.

Sebastian Smee can be reached at ssmee@globe.com